The association between religion and morality was only slowly established; the god was not better than the man; he was stronger than the man; thus mere power unaccompanied by moral excellence had a divine character even in a man. To us the Incarnate God is necessarily the perfection of moral excellence; to the ancients the manifestation of power was in itself an indication of the divine favour; and similarly in the case of his worshippers, provided the priest did not infringe the regulations of the prescribed ritual in preparing for or conducting an act of worship; his moral character was a matter of indifference; he might bring down the divine wrath upon the community by paring his nails at the wrong time, just as much as by the infringement of social obligations, or by personal debauchery; ritual and not morality was the province of religion. In the didactic work of Hesiod, the Farm and the Calendar, which was used by the Greeks much as we use a catechism, minute and trivial points of cleanliness and decency rank with perjury and violence; to neglect the former, to commit the latter, alike involved the displeasure of the immortals. The Italians were enslaved by minute ritual even more than the Greeks; they were more superstitious; the worship of the Lares and of the ancestors, the faith in fortune, the dread of the unlucky, survived among cultivated Italians to a late period. Italy is still profoundly superstitious; men who have shaken off the authority of the Church still dread the evil eye, and witchcraft of a peculiar kind is still firmly believed in by the peasants of central Italy; the strega is still a power in the villages of the Bolognese. The ancients had nothing to set against the ascription of Divine powers to a man, though for the enlightened it was possible to distinguish between ceremonial acts whose purpose was to propitiate the Divinity behind the man, and the worship of the man himself as a divine being; nor did death terminate the power of the favoured individual; the spirit was even more powerful when released from the accidents of humanity. Among the Italians faith in the power of the dead, and a considerable dread of their continued interference in the concerns of the living, was a lively faith, and exemplified in many curious ways; and thus the worship of Augustus, which was officially recognized only in the provinces during his lifetime, was extended to Italy after his death. This worship was not an exclusive worship; it did not destroy or even impair the cults of other divinities; it was only another god added to the celestial hierarchy, another saint canonized; but this particular worship was alone in being universal throughout the Empire and officially sanctioned; in Gaul it was imposed.